Cooperation will accelerate the widespread transition to Climate-smart rice farming initiatives in Northwest India using advanced satellite and AI technology
BENGALURU, India, Aug. 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Mitti Labs, an AI remote sensing and field operations company that empowers rice farmers with Climate-smart practices, today announced its participation in The Nature Conservancy’s PRANA program (‘Promoting Regenerative and No-Burn Agriculture’). PRANA is TNC’s landmark initiative tackling stubble burning and soil degradation in Punjab. Since 2022, PRANA has worked across 18 districts, helping farmers adopt regenerative practices and manage crop residues sustainably—improving soil health while curbing air pollution.
The program has already trained thousands of farmers through local camps, field demonstrations, and service provider engagement. In 2025, it plans to reach over 650,000 farmers in 6,259 villages, delivering more than 21,000 training sessions. Now evolving beyond crop residue management, PRANA is tackling deeper challenges like water scarcity, declining soil fertility, and greenhouse gas emissions. Its next phase focuses on building Regenerative Foodscapes by empowering farmer institutions, scaling local agri-entrepreneurship, and forging policy-shaping public-private partnerships.
“Mitti Labs has been a key partner in different aspects of this journey. Their advanced ‘soil-to-sky’ technology platform and on-the-ground measurement expertise have helped us to monitor practice adoption and quantify impacts at the field level with high accuracy. This robust data is not only useful to validating climate and environmental outcomes—it also lays the foundation for unlocking climate long term financing for farmers and informing policy shifts that can scale these solutions to reach many more farmers,” said Gyan Prakash Rai, PRANA Lead.
“We are beyond excited to see the impact of our successful collaboration with The Nature Conservancy,” said Xavi Laguarta, co-founder of Mitti Labs. “Helping hundreds of farming communities in NW India transition to Climate-smart practices truly validates our mission of turning rice farming into a powerful vehicle for climate action. Our rice-specific digital Measurement, Reporting and Verification is the key technology enabler of providing critical financial incentives to farmers in this transition.”
Mitti Labs’ partnership with TNC has also demonstrated the numerous co-benefits of Climate-smart farming practices, particularly on saving water and boosting farmer income. The PRANA program will help save 500 Billion liters of water, the equivalent of the consumption of a midsize city.
The PRANA foodscape’s mission is to support farmers in Punjab to adopt regenerative agricultural practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, restore soil health, and improve air quality. Practices such as Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), Direct Seeded Rice (DSR), and no-burn crop residue management are at the heart of this transition.
Mitti Labs was founded in 2023 to accelerate the adoption of nature-based solutions to climate change. The company works with 30,000 farmers to reduce methane emissions from rice farming, which contribute 12% of all total methane emissions, a gas 85X more potent than CO2. It is estimated that rice farming contributes 1GT CO2e to all global emissions, a volume on par with global aviation. Mitti Labs connects smallholder farmers to global companies looking to offset their emissions through high-quality carbon credits based on permanent and measurable methane reduction.
Mitti Labs has built the world’s most advanced dMRV for rice farming monitoring. This technology delivers country-level scale and field-level accuracy in the quantification of greenhouse gases derived from rice farming. In only 24 months, the Mitti Labs team has expanded its digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification capabilities to 10 Mn Hectares, meaning it has created a ”digital twin” of 25% of all the rice farming areas in India. Building a layer of robust real-time monitoring technology not only helps the PRANA team steer their program intervention towards regions of dire need; but also helps create visibility on the high-quality impact that on-ground teams are currently executing.
This technology leverages Mitti’s deep relationship with NASA. In 2024, Mitti Labs was awarded Phase I of a prestigious NASA SBIR Ignite grant in the amount of $150K. Last month, Mitti Labs received $850k for ‘Phase II’ of this NASA funding grant to continue its work leveraging its next-gen dMRV to monitor GHG emissions from rice farming in India.
In the fertile state of Punjab, two million farmers transition every year from growing rice to planting wheat. The two-week rotation window, in many cases shortened by a changing climate, leaves farmers with no choice but to burn the residue from rice -straw and husk- which represents 90% of the total crop biomass. These small fires are major contributors to CO2 emissions, poor air quality and chronic disease.
About Mitti Labs
Mitti Labs combines satellite technology, AI and operations on the ground to permanently reduce methane emissions from rice farming. By doing this, the company unlocks the potential of rice-based carbon credits for climate impact at scale. Mitti Labs is backed by Lightspeed, Voyager Ventures, Cisco, and Volta Circle in its mission to decarbonize the $300 Bn rice-growing industry worldwide. Visit mittilabs.earth to learn more.
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